Thursday, January 7, 2010

Toilet Paper?

Yes! Today we used toilet paper to learn about science! How fun is that? To better understand how far from the sun each planet is we made a model. Remember kids...I am not Ms. Frizzle and can't turn our school bus in to a rocket ship and take you to the moon, therefore we have to make a model. The solar system is way to big to "see" so we have to model it! Toilet paper came in handy today for our solar system model!The students were put into groups today and assigned two different planets. They were provided with a chart telling them how many sheets of toilet paper each planet is away from the sun. Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, was 3 sheets of toilet paper from the sun. Neptune, the farthest planet from the sun, was 224 sheets of toilet paper from the sun. The kids did quite a bit of counting today!I was very proud of the teamwork efforts. The students seem to take every assignment seriously in Science! Even if it does involve toilet paper!After this activity, we went back to the classroom and made bar graphs in the science notebooks!

Solar System tips-Students need to know the following:The Earth Rotates as it revolves around the sunOne rotation of the Earth is one day...24 hoursone revolution is a year.the Earth revolving around the sun is also called an orbit...gravity holds all the planets in orbitMy Very Excellent Mother Just Served Us Nachos...is a good way to help remember the order of the planets...Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptunethe sun is a star made up of gases

You would need vast amounts of TP if your scale resulted in Earth being 7/10 of an inch in diameter. Neptune would be 2.5 inches in diameter in that scale a mere 4 miles away. The sun would be 76 feet in diameter and it would be 688 feet from earth.

If you made earth 7/10 of an inch in diameter you would need about 688 feet of toilet paper, Neptune would require about 4 miles of TP. If you made earth 1/1000 of an inch in diameter you would only need about 60 feet of TP more Neptune.

Hello all! I googled the activity to find the amount of toilet paper to use for each planet. There are several links. I am using this one:www.astrosociety.org/education/family/materials/toiletpaper.pdf